Rain Falls on Everyone

by Rain Falls on Everyone (retail) (epub)

  Then a slap rang out and the scream that followed set his teeth on edge.

  He hesitated. He really shouldn’t get involved.

  “Ye’re comin’ with me, ye bitch. Whether ye like it or not. Now, get moving or I’ll belt ye again.”

  Now, he could just make out a soft sobbing: “No, no, no. I didn’t mean…”

  Theo ran towards the noise. They were standing at the corner. The lad had hold of her arm and was trying to drag her across the street. She had her head down but she was not budging and for a second, they looked like dancers – his arm stretched out, holding hers, his foot reaching behind him, her leaning back, all spotlit by the street lamp above. But Theo had seen this kind of dancing before and it never ended well.

  “Hey, what’s going on here then, lads?”

  They both looked up but the boy didn’t loosen his grip. Theo recognised the pimply git who had been minding Michael’s bike outside the flat a few weeks ago. No big surprise that that gobshite would be wreaking havoc at this hour. He probably wasn’t carrying a gun yet, though the little upstart might have a knife. He’d take it easy. But then he saw the girl’s face. It was Cara. A wide-eyed, tear-stained Cara and she was looking at him like he was God, Jesus and Justin Timberlake rolled into one.

  “Howya, Cara? Is this lad causing problems?”

  “Mind yer own business and feck off.”

  Theo had to hand it to the little gurrier. He had balls. He was half Theo’s size but had no fear on him. Theo saw his hand edging towards the pocket of his sagging trackies. So he had a knife then. Alright so.

  “Leave her be and go home to your mammy. This lady is out of your league. So get out of here.”

  “Who’s gonna make me?”

  Theo felt like he was back in the playground but he didn’t need Neville to help him now.

  “I’ll make you if I have to but I don’t think any of us wants that so why don’t you be a good lad and head off to your bed. This lady is not interested and to tell you the honest to God truth, I’m not that surprised.”

  The lad dropped Cara’s arm and launched himself towards Theo, the knife in his hand flashing in the light of the street lamp. Theo stepped back as the blade sliced towards him. It was just a penknife. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Cara slump down by the wall, head in hands. Too many rum and cokes there, for sure.

  As the young lad came towards him again, he moved sideways, grabbed his scrawny wrist and squeezed until the knife clattered onto the path. He yanked the lad’s arm behind his back and leaned in as the little rat twisted and turned, trying to break free.

  “Now, what did I say? Feck off out of here.”

  Theo wrenched the lad’s arm a little more and then shoved him roughly into the road. He picked up the knife.

  “And you’re not getting this back until you learn manners. And how to treat a lady. Now, go home before I really hurt you.”

  The lad stood in the road. He was all rage and hurt pride and, for a moment, Theo almost felt sorry for him.

  “Why don’t you fuck off back to yer own place, ye savage monkey? What ye doin’ here, anyways? I seen you around. You think yer all that now cos you’re with Michael. But you’se a liability. Can’t trust your lot. Fuck off back to Africa!”

  Theo feinted a move towards the lad and at last he had the sense to retreat. He walked backwards at first, across the street, flipping the bird as he went. Theo just shook his head, watching him until he got to the path on the other side and slouched off round the corner. He’d have to watch himself now, even more than before. That kind of weasel would bear a grudge. He’d have a word with Michael about him. He might well be a savage but he was Gerrity’s savage now. The little shite would be sorry yet.

  He knelt by Cara who was still sobbing, still hunkered down on the path.

  “What was that all about then, Cara? Never mind. None of my business. C’mon now. Let’s get you home. You’re nearly there anyways.”

  Gently, Theo lifted her up, holding her under the arms until he got her onto her feet.

  “Sorry, sorry. I feel like such an eejit.”

  The words came out like a child’s – hyphenated by hiccups and thick with tears. Her face was a mess: mascara running down her cheeks, a red mark where the tosser had whacked her, her nose running. She reeked of spirits and cigarettes. The straps of her deep-blue top were half off her shoulders, so that the middle sagged, showing the cups of her black bra. She straightened her clothes, and lifted her wide blue eyes to Theo.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. “I dunno… I was so stupid… I just wanted to… I didn’t mean him to think… but I should’ve… Oh God, I’m mortified.”

  Even with the face on her, she was a good-looking lass, Theo thought. Those eyes would make the hardest man talk. Dathúil. That was it, she was dathúil. The Irish for pretty but really it could be translated as colourful. She was full of colour and life, even with the marks of tears on her cheeks.

  “Don’t worry about that now. Let’s get you home. Is your face okay?”

  “Yeah, it smarts a bit. I know how to pick ’em, eh?”

  She tried to smile and, in that instant, Theo wanted to wrap his arms right round her so that pimply gits never got to touch her again. It was more than a conscious feeling, it was pure instinct and it was pulling him back to a place he didn’t want to go. With an arm firmly under hers, he led her along the road. She stumbled a little but that might be the heels on her black, buckled boots. She seemed to have sobered up pretty fast.

  “Thank God you came along. I don’t know what… What are you doing out in the dead of the night, though?”

  Theo smiled down at the top of her head.

  “Ah didn’t I tell you? At night, I’m a superhero. A big, black, savage superhero.”

  She giggled and the sound lit up his brain like someone was playing the steelpans in there.

  “D’ye get a lot of that, like, racism? Tommy’s so ignorant. Never been further than Howth and he thinks he’s something.”

  “A little,” Theo said.

  How to condense more than a decade of insults, big and small? The lukewarm shame of spit running down his face as punk teenagers jeered, a banana thrown on the path in front of him by a bunch of kids as he walked to school, rants from red-cheeked, slurring women on buses, the n-word that he still couldn’t bring himself to say. He’d grown up afraid to put a foot out of place – ridiculous when he was already, feet, arms and every little piece of him, out of place. He supposed every teenager felt the same fear of ridicule, of standing out instead of fitting in, but few white Irish teenagers grew up terrified that standing out could literally mean being knocked down. Some people called it Afrophobia, like it was some kind of cool crossover music genre. No point burdening Cara with this. It was his reality not hers. Why darken her view of her city any more than tonight already had? Wouldn’t change anything. Preaching to the converted.

  “It’s better now though. Sure, there’s all sorts in Ireland now: Asians, Africans, Iraqis, Serbs. You can’t move for us ‘savages’,” he said, laughing.

  “There’s the Nigerian guy, whatsisname? The one who became mayor of Portlaoise a few years ago, and your man, the guy who’s half-Indian, who’s a big cheese now in Fine Gael. It’s just the low-lifes who are not moving with the times, like your Tommy there.”

  “He’s not my Tommy.”

  She was hurt and Theo felt bad. She’d been through enough and she’d have to do her own reckoning of what happened in a few hours, and with a sore head to boot. He should leave her alone. She was only eighteen, she’d a lot to learn.

  “Mind you,” she said, “there was that terrible case of those poor Polish guys, you know, one of them got a screwdriver through the head. That was a disgrace.”

  “Yeah, that was a shocker, alright,” Theo said. “I remember it. All those people saying it wasn’t racism, that the lads were just off their heads. What did they call it? ‘Mindless violence’. My arse, it was mindle
ss violence. Too much mind in it, in my opinion. And the lad who was killed there in Tyrrelstown on Good Friday. That wasn’t because he was playing for Shelbourne’s youth team either.”

  They were silent for a while. Theo reckoned it was about 4 am. They could’ve been the only people left in the world. On this back street, there were no buses taking weary night-time workers home and nobody here was up yet, though a few birds were starting to chirp and the stars were fading like the dreams in the houses all around them.

  They had nearly reached Cara’s house and were passing the little patch of green where teenagers drank cans of cider in the evenings, clustered on a bench under a single willow tree, raucous and seemingly oblivious to tutting passers-by but at the same time acutely aware of the impression they were making.

  “Can we sit for a minute? I just need to get my head straight before I go in.”

  Theo led Cara to the bench, pushing the strings of soft leaves out of the way.

  “Are you going to get a scalding from your mam?” he asked. He vaguely remembered meeting Ronan’s mother once before when he went round to fetch him out for a drink. A small, fairly young woman in jeans and one of those off-the-shoulder tops came to the door, big eyes wide in a closed face. She gave Theo a good once-over after she’d hollered for Ronan, keeping him waiting there on the doorstep. A good Dub mother, he thought. Sheila would’ve done the same to any stranger looking for him. Still, he’d leave Cara at the gate tonight. He didn’t want to take the fall for Tommy and sometimes there just wasn’t enough time to explain before judgment was delivered.

  “Yeah, for sure. But not ’til tomorrow. She takes pills to sleep, says she’d never shut her eyes otherwise what with worrying about Dad working out on the oil rigs and everything. And Ronan’ll be dead to the world.” Cara sighed. “It’s not that. I just don’t want to go in yet. I’ll not be able to sleep now.”

  Her teeth were chattering. She was not dressed for the outside. Irish girls never were. All bare-bellied, bare-shouldered optimism as though the evening would never end, the pub would never close and there’d be no queue at the taxi rank.

  “Here.”

  He stood up, took off his leather jacket and held it out. He didn’t want to put it round her shoulders, that felt too much like a cheesy gesture that would put him somewhere he didn’t want to be. She took it gratefully.

  “Thanks a million. I’m freezing.”

  “So are you still celebrating the end of the Leaving?” Theo asked. “That’s a good few weeks ago now? Some fierce stamina you young ones have.”

  “No, I just… I just wanted to get out of the house, to have some fun and forget the Leaving, the results, all that shaggin’ pressure to do well in something most people say is a waste of time anyways.” The words exploded from her like water from a busted dam. He’d forgotten the sheer, overwhelming enormity of being a teenager. It made him want to smile but it also made him sad. We’re always being ambushed by the things that we’ve lost, he thought.

  They fell silent again, listening to the willow branches whispering above and around them, swapping whatever secrets they’d overheard during the day. Theo was just beginning to think he’d better get back to Precious when Cara spoke again. Her voice was calmer now.

  “We talked a bit about Rwanda at school. Turns out our religion teacher was there as a volunteer with, I can’t remember now, Trócaire, or Concern, or Goal, one of those lads. Anyway, she was very worked up about… what happened. Said it was a stain on the consciousness of mankind. S’that what you think too, Theo? I’m supposing that’s why ye left?”

  Theo said nothing for a moment. Wouldn’t it be great to have a past you could banter about, a past you could sum up in a few jokes, wisecracks about your parents’ car, the desperate choice on TV then, the awful clothes, the immersion? His past was so embarrassing, so unacceptable.

  “Yeah, that’s why I left.”

  “D’ye ever want to go back? D’ye have family there still?”

  “No, there’s no one now. I think they’re all dead. They must all be dead.”

  “You don’t know for sure?”

  Theo took a breath. He should stand up, take her back, go home to Precious, who might already be stirring and wondering where the hell he was. But there was something out-of-time about this moment, sitting here under the willow, curtained from the sleeping world, with this girl with her tear-stained face and wide eyes, looking up at him and seeing him and wondering about him. He didn’t want to break the spell – and his nightmare was still flitting around the corners of his brain, goading him to catch it with his net of words.

  And so in the nowhere, no-time moment, he started to speak.

  “I was seven and they were coming for us – me, my mother and my father, my brother Clément, and baby sister, Angélique. You probably know this already but they were killing Tutsis, that’s one of the main tribes, and I think they didn’t trust us. My father was a Hutu and a teacher but my mother was a Tutsi. And I think now my father, his name was Thomas, I think he must’ve said something against it all in the weeks before. Because they’d been getting ready for a while to do… the killing. They’d been training militias and all that. A lot of people don’t realise how organised it all was. I didn’t either then but I was only seven. A lot of this I’ve learned since by reading books about it. Isn’t that mad? Anyways, we ran from our house and we had another Tutsi with us, the guy who worked on our farm. His name was Shema. I’m not sure where we were going, I was only a kid. We must’ve come across some of the Interahamwe – that means men with a single purpose in my… in the language they use – and then I suppose… Well, I can’t really remember everything but I saw my father kill Shema, and then… I dunno… everyone disappeared and I was alone and I ran. I was in the bush for a few weeks, I think. Alone mostly but then I met another group and they took me in. They were Tutsis but they took me with them anyway. I ended up at, like, a refugee camp. I didn’t know then where I was but it was in Tanzania, next-door to Rwanda. The border was not too far from where I grew up. I mean it was a bit of a way. You wouldn’t walk it here – you’d end up in Wales. Anyway, I was waiting outside that camp, hoping to see my family, and this white lady came by in a big white car and she took me inside the camp and… I dunno why… but then she kept an eye on me and I guess she liked me, or something, because when they couldn’t trace my family she arranged for me to come here. That was my foster mother’s sister, Cath, and so I was fostered by Jim and Sheila and that’s it really.”

  He said all this staring into the dark but now he sneaked a sideways look at the girl beside him. She was also looking away, across the patch of green. Maybe she didn’t understand or he’d spoken too fast. He did that sometimes when he was telling the story – there was always too much and, without all the details, it sounded so banal, like a lesson he’d learned off by heart, so he tended to run through it, as though he was summing up a particularly dull weekend. But he couldn’t inflict the real details on anyone because those pictures had to stay in his head. He was the custodian of that horror, like a male Pandora, and if he let it out, he couldn’t know what it would do. If he started telling the full truth of those weeks, he would never stop talking.

  Then her hand was on his, small and very white and totally unexpected so that he curled his fingers around hers, almost without thinking.

  They sat like that for a while longer and then, as if a bell had sounded, they stood up, dropped each other’s hands, and walked back to her place.

  She didn’t say anything until they got to the gate in front of the shabby two-up two-down.

  “Sounds like ye should find out what happened to yer family. S’always better to know, otherwise ye won’t be able to shake it off. That’s what me mam says. She always sees the glass half-empty so she likes to know what’s coming up, the better to dodge it, ye know? But I think she might have a point: knowledge is power, isn’t that what they say?”

  She took the jacket off her shoulde
rs and handed it back. She looked tiny again, newly frail and vulnerable.

  “Ah I dunno. They also say too much knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Sometimes it’s best to leave these things alone,” Theo said, smiling so she knew he didn’t think her advice was stupid. He didn’t but it was an idea for here, not for there. It was an idea that could only exist in a well-ordered world like this, not in the chaos he’d left behind. She didn’t understand and why should she? It was alright.

  “Thanks again, Theo. I don’t know…”

  “Don’t worry ‘bout it. Sure it was just good luck I came along. I guess the god of nights on the lash was looking out for you. But stay away from that Tommy in future. I’ve seen him around before and he’s a bad one, getting worse all the time.”

  He guessed he sounded like her dad might’ve, if he’d not been off working in the North Sea, but Theo didn’t care. That lad would break Cara’s future into tiny pieces and stamp on them, without a thought. Theo had met plenty of Tommys along the way.

  “See ya at work.”

  She walked up the path, put the key in the lock, turned, smiled and then was gone.

  Walking home, Theo realised the ‘Tommys’ he was warning Cara about included himself. There was no point denying it any longer. Somehow over the last few months, he’d crossed some kind of line so that he was definitely no longer a nixer. He was just a little higher up the ladder than Tommy, which, if anything, made him worse. The thought made him walk faster, anger pushing him back towards Precious.

  His phone rang. Neville. What the hell did he want at this hour?

  “Theo, thank God. Listen man, I’m in trouble. I… I… need somewhere to stay tonight. Are you at home?”